Frequently Asked Questions

Financial advisory firms: Also known as RIAs (Registered Investment Advisors) or wealth management firms, these firms manage investments. They also offer financial planning services: income and expense planning, retirement, etc.

Tax firms: Tax firms are made up of CPAs and licensed accountants that provide tax audit, filing, strategy, and planning services for individuals and businesses.

Trust & estate firms: These firms specialize in the creation and execution of various estate planning components (wills, trusts, gifts, guardianship, powers of attorney, etc.) in order to make sure all documents are legally binding and lower the tax burdens on you and your beneficiaries.

For those with complex financial situations, the most optimal approach comes from having all three firms working in tandem. However, the various permutations of the types of services is highly individual and the blend of these services will change with you as your life and career progress.

Similar to how you may work with a family doctor, a dentist, and/or an internal medicine specialist for your overall health, your team of advisors are all experienced specialists in their respective fields, and Harness Wealth makes it easier for you and for them to work together. 

Yes, we can certainly help you find one type of firm. It is not required that you use all three, or even two. Many Harness Wealth clients start off with one specific need (for example, optimizing their personal taxes with a tax firm) and then later find that they have additional, related needs that come up later on, and will start working with a financial advising firm and/or a trust & estate firm for a more holistic strategy.

The fees you pay to the firms vary, and can be dependent on the amount of assets they manage for you and the complexity of your needs, but here are the typical fees for the most common services:

• • Investment management: Fees start at 1% or lower for the first $1M of investable assets. From there, they tend to go down as the investable assets increase.
  • Financial planning, tax planning and filing (CPAs), estate planning document creation: A flat fee of $1,000-$5,000 dollars per service.

You will not be charged an additional fee by Harness Wealth or our firms for using our service. I.e., we do not charge clients anything for using us to find and evaluate firms, nor are the firms allowed to charge clients that come in via Harness Wealth any more than they would charge non-Harness Wealth clients for the same services.

We are paid by the firms for the clients that we refer to them, so we’re incentivized to help you make good long-term decisions about which firms you work with. We believe it’s important for you to find the right advisors for you, not just any advisors, so we are not compensated for any meetings you have during your search. 

Harness Wealth’s technology analyzes your personal and financial events, income, assets, goals, and personal preferences and uses them to recommend not only the type(s) of services that you need, but also the individual firms that are right for you.

You may be starting totally from scratch (“I have no idea what I need help with, I just know that I need help!”) and you can receive plenty of guidance (“You need tax planning and tax preparation from a boutique firm that specializes in IPOs.”). Or, you may have a more concrete idea of what you need (“I’m expecting a windfall and want help investing those funds, with a focus on sustainable investments.”) and we can help you find specific, pre-screened firms that meet these requirements. 

Once you complete our onboarding process and input information about your finances, we determine the type(s) of firms that are best suited for your needs, and refer you to 2-3 firms of each type for you to compare side-by-side.

From there, your Harness Wealth Concierge will help schedule your conversations (via phone, video call, or in-person, whichever you prefer) and help manage the secure transfer of documents with the advisors at the firms you’re interested in.

Many clients request follow-up calls to get a better sense of their comfort level with the advisor, firm experience, and personal fit. Choosing an advisor is an important decision and in many cases, one that lasts several years. We encourage clients to be thoughtful about making a decision about an advisor who will provide consultative services to you over the course of several years, through many of life’s ups and downs. All introductory calls are complimentary. 

You can read more here about Harness Wealth Firm Consultations: What to Expect and Prepare.

Harness Tax is one of the tax firm options you may see in your recommendations in Harness Wealth. This is our in-house brand with affiliate tax teams. If, based on your Harness Wealth profile, the Harness Tax services, pricing, etc. are a good fit for your needs, you will see them along your other external tax firm recommendations.

Harness Tax doesn’t receive preferential treatment in our recommendation algorithm, and we encourage you to evaluate them just as you would any other firm on our platform. 

You can read more about our reasons for establishing Harness Tax here.

Yes, we offer a fully digital experience. From filling out your profile, being introduced to advisors, comparing the firms, setting up meetings, and sending over documents, everything is done online. During your evaluation calls, you can choose to have phone, video, or in-person meetings. The firms on our platform have been pre-screened for their ability to work remotely with clients all over the country.

Certain localized industries are often best serviced by firms who are based in that area (for example, the startup and venture capital industries in the San Francisco Bay Area) and some clients have some state-specific needs that are best serviced by a local firm.

However, we’ve found that clients are able to have excellent, productive relationships with advisors remotely as well. Given most specializations are not so geographically concentrated, we encourage you prioritize overall fit (working style, experience relevant to your needs, pricing that fits your budget, etc.) over proximity in your search. 

Your concierge is assigned to you after you register on our site, and will be available to help you throughout your search. They can provide:

• • General assistance with our platform, deadlines to keep in mind, etc.
  • Baselining information about typical pricing, services, etc. for each industry (financial advisory, tax, trust & estate).
  • Scheduling and documentation support for consultation calls with your firms.
  • Product support and feedback in case you have any trouble with or questions about filling out your Harness Wealth profile or shortlisting your advisors.

Our clients are typically experiencing major financial milestones or complexity in their finances. This includes:

• Entrepreneurs, founders, small business owners
• Employees with equity
• VCs and angel investors
• Cryptocurrency holders
• Those working, living, or managing assets across states or countries

Conduct your own search of financial, tax, and trust & estate firms:

• Pros: You have full control over the process.
• Cons: You have full control over the process. It can require a lot of legwork re: evaluation for quality and fit, scheduling, baselining fees and services, and due diligence into specialty services.

Traditional wirehouse advisors and institutional investment firms:

• Pros: Ubiquitous, well-known.
• Cons: Top performing individual advisors are going independent, and they’re more affordable when they’re at smaller firms. The most ambitious advisors are leaving traditional firms set up their own offices, and for the best of the best (strong educational backgrounds, advanced degrees, decades of specialized experience), you’ll have to go outside of the big banks. Wirehouse advisors are not guaranteed to be fiduciaries, and typically receive commissions for recommending in-house investments that may or may not be necessarily the best fit for you.

Robo advisors:

• Pros: Basic automated approaches to best practices when it comes to investment management, and is a good fit for those with fewer types of assets to manage and a simple financial situation overall.
• Cons: These tools are designed for mass consumption, and generally account for only a handful of basic situations. If you have any personalized financial concerns or go beyond their typical user profiles, the recommendations can be significantly less effective.

Referrals from friends and family:

• Pros: You have a firsthand recommendation from someone you know personally.
• Cons: Your friends, even those that have some financial expertise, do not have continuous exposure to a high quantity of firms across specialties and experience levels. Based on your specific needs and goals, certain firms will be a better fit for you, and we make it our business to analyze and understand what makes for the most productive advisor-client relationships.

Do nothing:

• Pros: It’s easy.
• Cons: Finding trusted, expert financial advice is something you probably know you should do but have likely been putting off for a long time. Financial advising has been shown to add stability and increased performance to investment portfolios. Especially when financial advising is combined more holistically with tax and estate planning, you’ll be maximizing the value of your existing assets, reducing your tax liability, and significantly lowering financial risk, and the sooner you start, the better.

DIY: Doing your own financial planning, investment management, and tax planning.

• Pros: It’s free.
• Cons: You, armed with a few textbooks, Excel sheets, and Google, could probably manage your own finances. This is also probably true of car repair and some basic medical procedures. We recommend that you be thoughtful about the ROI on your time, the risk-reward ratio if things go awry, and your competitive advantage when it comes to certain types of tasks.

With Harness Wealth, you get the best of several worlds: The agility of tech solutions, the benefits of “traditional” wealth management wisdom, and white-glove service to suit your personal needs.

Yes. We never sell client information to any outside sources. We anonymize PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data and have strict access rules, meaning that data is restricted, whether accessed internally and/or externally by advisors.

Access to any sensitive information is limited to only those authorized employees and other individuals who we determine reasonably require access to sensitive information to accomplish a legitimate business purpose or to comply with legal requirements.

Firewalls provide defense against inbound attacks and logging of network activity log showing sites accessed by device. Firewall rules in the VPC ensure no unauthorized outside access can reach our internal applications or access client data. 

Our firms are interviewed a minimum of 5 times and screened for over 120 attributes to measure the quality of their services.

As an example, these are the baseline requirements for a financial advisory firm to be included in our network:

Compliance

• Regulatory Review: We work with advisors that are registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)* and operate under a fiduciary standard. Harness Wealth reviews the public disclosure reports and/or FINRA BrokerCheck reports of the selected investment adviser representatives that will work with matched clients. Any issues or possible conflicts are reviewed by the Chief Compliance Officer.
• Investment oversight: Clearly defined investment procedure (e.g., Chief Investment Officer and/or research team, and compliance oversight).
• Custodial platform: Our investment advisors maintain custody of their client assets with one of the industry standard financial institutions – Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Bank of New York Mellon, Raymond James, or Pershing.

Fees

• Investment due diligence: Investment decisions must be vetted by an in-house investment team.
• Financial planning services: Financial planning is a core offering and is included in an asset-based fee structure unless the AUM fees are 40% below the industry average for a combined service package.
• Competitive fees: Firms must charge at or below industry standard fees. For any firms charging more than 1.5%, these firms must offer additional, more comprehensive services in addition to investment management and financial planning, including but not limited to: tax planning, estate planning, family office services.

Services and expertise

• Responsiveness: Firm commits to responding to client inquiries within 24 hours and seeks to deliver a high level of client service attention and sophistication.
• Assets under management (AUM): Minimum of $300M in discretionary assets. We make exceptions to this minimum for qualifying wealth managers on our platform who solely provide standalone financial planning or other legacy relationships.
• Financial planning offering: Firm must offer financial planning as part of the overall investment management services.
• Tax efficient strategies: Tax efficient strategies must be offered as part of their investment management process (e.g., tax-loss harvesting).

Staff

• Certifications: Each investment adviser representative working with matched clients must have an industry-specific designation or be working towards a designation. Eligible list: CFP, CFA, CIMA, JD, CPA.
• Team-based approach: Firm must have a team-based approach to relationship management. Individual investment adviser representatives must have administrative support.
• Industry experience: Firm owners, principals and investment adviser representatives must collectively have 30 years of industry experience.

Security and technology

• Technology standards: Required client portal and use of industry standard advisor technology for financial planning, risk management, portfolio management, and reporting. Must be a technology-forward** firm with strong infrastructure.
• Client data: Firm has a defined cybersecurity and information security policy with demonstrable procedures to protect client data.
• No recent data breaches: Firm has not had any significant data breaches in the last 5 years.

Across the board, advisors at firms selected by Harness Wealth typically have at least 15 years of experience, hold advanced degrees (MBA, JD, MST, etc.), and have a variety of specialty certifications (CFP, CFA, CPA, EA, etc.)

We have a more detailed overview of our advisor selection process for all three types of firms here. 

Advisor-client relationships are highly personal. We know that the best, most effective partnerships happen when the client feels completely comfortable with and confident in their advisor’s work. We want to make sure that you find the right advisory firm for you, so if you are not satisfied with the Harness Wealth advisor or firm you select after the first year, we will refund 100% of your fees.

To qualify for the advisory fee credit, the individual must formally retain a Certified Public Accountant, Trust & Estate Attorney, and/or a Financial Advisor on the Harness Wealth platform for a minimum of one calendar year. The offer can only be applied to advisory fees for firms based in the United States. The offer does not apply for Certified Public Accountant fees for tax return preparation and filing or for Trust & Estate Attorney fees for a will that was executed. Harness Wealth will provide the credit directly to the customer upon proof of fees paid. This credit is not transferable. Only one credit per household.

The Harness Wealth Council is our own group of company advisors, made up of former finance executives, national policy-makers, academics, and ultra-high-net-worth family office executives. They developed the screening process for the Harness Wealth advisors that we recommend, and provide feedback and industry insight into how we can continue to provide highly competitive, top-tier services and tools to our clients.

You can read more about their individual profiles here.